Synopsis
A collection of short stories by the author of Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light includes the tale of a doctor who has escaped to London and returns to communist Czechoslovakia to be with a woman only to discover too late that he barely knows her and the story of a young woman begins an affair with an older man.
Reviews
Sophisticated readers may expect to admire anything new from the justly revered Czech novelist (Waiting for the Light, Waiting for the Dark). Many of them will be disappointed with these 12 short stories. Klima's tales are sorted into three unequal sections: "Lovers for One Night" collects five stories from the 1960s, while "Intimate Conversations" and "About Love and Death" hold seven from the '80s and '90s. All these dejected fictions concern the success or failure of hopeful myths of intimacyAbut they are not equally successful. The fiction from the '60s tends to drown in involuted rhetoric; sometimes it's trite, other times it's supercharged with languid enervations and prominent symbolism through which the characters barely appear. It's hard to know whether the translator or Klima is responsible for such clunky prose as "She knew everything. She knew precisely why it was worth living. She knew precisely why it was not worth living." The last few tales (all from 1994) strike clearer, would-be Chekhovian notes. In "Rich Men Tend to Be Strange," a greedy car dealer, dying in a terminal ward, tries to leave a fortune in cash to his nurse. "The White House" is brilliant by any reckoning: a student falls in loveAor is it love?Awith a disarmingly honest blind girl, who insists that he's planning to leave her. But other recent stories can be dismayingly predictable and banally sententious. An underappreciated wife, mother and nurse in "A Baffling Choice" becomes enamored of her downstairs neighbor, a 65-year-old invalid, bookbinder and self-taught painter. When he seems about to reject her, she asks, "How could he call into question the very thing that had raised them above what would otherwise be a meaningless existence?" Klima likes to stop and spell out the point he's making, in a manner alien to most modern English-language fiction. Only sometimes do the philosophical rewards of his methods seem worth its costs in detail. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Lovers For A Day ($24.00; Sept.; 240 pp.; 0-8021-1651-5): A disappointing collection of 12 stories, dating from the early 60s through the mid-90s, from the Czechoslovakian author (The Ultimate Intimacy, 1998, etc.). The early pieces are drearily generic portrayals of the unpredictability and impermanence of romantic love in a politically charged climate where allegiances of all kinds are routinely shattered or betrayed; humdrum glimpses (``The Assembly Line,'' ``The Honeymoon Trip'') of ``people [who] love . . . longing for it to last but without any hope of its lasting.'' ``Long-Distance Conversations'' and ``Conjugal Conversations,'' consisting entirely of dialogue, are particularly weak. Of the (generally much better) later stories, two stand out for being much more fully imagined: ``The White House, about a lonely young man's vacillating affection for a beautiful blind girl, and the brilliant ``A Baffling Choice,'' about a married woman's inexplicable attraction to the ``senile cripple'' who becomes her lover. Both are vintage Klmathe only justifications for an otherwise unnecessary volume. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The stories in this collection by prolific Czech writer Klima (e.g., The Judge on Trial, The Ultimate Intimacy) are grouped into three categories: "Lovers for One Night," "Intimate Conversations," and "About Life and Death." With precise prose and an uncanny ability to write conversations between husband and wife or lovers, Klima gives the reader accurate portrayals of life. The overwhelming need for love and the unlikely matches that sometimes occur are deftly explored. In "The White House," young Jakub reluctantly discovers that he has fallen in love with a blind girl. "Rich Men Tend To Be Strange" is a good title for a tale about a dying man planning to leave his life's savings to a kind nurse who is a complete stranger. All of the stories in this collection are excellent. Highly recommended.
-ALisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Czech writer Klima is simply not read widely enough in the U.S. Born in Prague, he served as editor of the Literary News, the weekly publication of the writers' union. That periodical was closed upon the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, at which time Klima's fiction and drama were banned. That's all over now, of course, and he can freely display his talents at home as well as abroad. As the title of this collection indicates, love is the theme connecting the stories. A variation on that theme is worked out provocatively in "Execution of a Horse," in which a young woman whose relationship recently ended goes for a walk; she then drives off with a man to what turns out to be a mink farm, where she witnesses an old horse being put down, and at the end of the day she ironically understands more about life and love. Klima is a master of the significant detail--telling only that which is essential. Brad Hooper
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